Personal computers have become mainstream computing devices for the past two decades. One of the core components of a personal computer whether desktop or laptop is a mother board, which is the central or primary circuit board providing attachment points for one or more of the following: processor (CPU), graphics card, sound card, hard disk drive controller, memory (Random Access Memory (RAM)), and other external devices. All of the basic circuitry and components required for a personal computer to function are onboard the motherboard or are connected with a cable. The most important component on a motherboard is the chipset known as memory control hub (MCH) and input/output (I/O) control hub (ICH). MCH typically handles communications between CPU, RAM, Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCI-E), and ICH. ICH controls real time clock, Universal-Serial-Bus (USB), Advance Power Management (APM) and other secondary storage devices such as hard disk drives.
Traditionally, hard disk drives have been used as a secondary storage in a computing device. With advance of non-volatile memory (e.g., flash memory), some attempts have been made to use non-volatile memory as the secondary storage. However, the non-volatile memory based secondary storage has not been able to achieve high performance, such as the level of the performance defined in Ultra Direct Memory Access (UDMA). DMA is referred to as transferring data from one storage device to memory to another device without using a central processing unit. UDMA is newer version of DMA with much higher speed or performance in its standards.
Therefore it would be desirable to provide a high performance flash memory device (FMD) in a computer system to achieve or exceed the performance defined in UDMA.